Producing any album always comes with a unique set of challenges, and Christmas Around the World was no exception. As in the past, the music for this album was arranged in MuseScore Studio, with tracks mixed and mastered in Reaper. The album cover image was developed using Stable Diffusion and I used Davinci Resolve to produce the promotional videos you’ll be seeing soon.
The Art of One-Man A Capella
While the technical side was familiar, new challenges came with the recording of one specific track: the a cappella version of Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming. It’s normally a thrill melding four separate voices into one cohesive sound, but it’s a very different challenge when all four voices belong to the same person and you can’t just “look at each other” to coordinate entrances and cutoffs. And while I had recorded If You Were the Only Girl in the World as an a capella piece on The Good Old Summertime, this time I was hoping to improve on the process.
Prep Work
Having done this before, I knew that this time I wanted to spend more time preparing for the recording. After developing the full arrangement of the piece in MuseScore Studio, I added a brief instrumental introduction (used for recording only) to set the key. Then I adjusted the tempo—sometimes note by note—so that the playback was true to the feel I wanted for the piece. This also meant writing out each pause and adding silent beats to ensure a clean count-in for new entrances. After adding a click track, I finally had a precise guide I could follow while recording.
Mixing and Matching
With this prep work out of the way I started recording the vocal parts, listening each time to a piano accompaniment playing the parts. With multiple takes available for each voice, I looked phrase by phrase for the best performance both in quality and timing – starting with the lead voice, then matching the others to it. The final step was manually aligning plosives and breaths across all four parts to make them sound as if they were performed together in a single take.
The Final Result
Because of this process, this piece required much more time post-recording than the others. But in the end, I was very happy with how the recording came out. It’s very gratifying to hear the individual parts come together into a single voice, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed creating it.
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to get the latest news on Christmas Around the World as it moves closer to release. And get ready to Stamp Your Passport November 6th.
